A trio of Caltech faculty members have been selected to receive the 2026 Sloan Research Fellowship: Elias Most, assistant professor of theoretical astrophysics; Huy Tuan Pham, assistant professor of mathematics and Rosenberg Scholar; and Lingfu Zhang, assistant professor of mathematics.
Awarded annually since 1955, the fellowships honor "early-career researchers whose creativity, innovation, and research accomplishments make them stand out as the next generation of leaders," according to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which bestows the awards. This year, 126 early career researchers were chosen to receive the honor, which includes a two-year $75,000 stipend that can be used flexibly to advance the fellow's research.
Most, who joined Caltech in 2023, studies the physics of the most extreme events in the universe, such as smashups between neutron stars, colliding supermassive black holes at the hearts of galaxies, and other high-energy astrophysical phenomena and exotic space-warping oddities. He uses supercomputers to simulate and explore the relativistic universe, a task that requires detailed knowledge of nuclear physics; plasma physics; and gravity, i.e., Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity.
In one set of papers, Most and his colleagues used supercomputer simulations to track what happens when a black hole swallows a neutron star whole. Their calculations demonstrated that in addition to gravitational waves, these systems can potentially produce some of the strongest "monster" shock waves in the universe, leading to the formation of an exotic, previously hypothesized "black hole pulsar." Most received his bachelor's degree from the University of Göttingen in 2013, and his PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2020.
Pham, who joined Caltech in 2025, studies combinatorics and probability, with a focus on large, random networks that are commonly used to model traffic or social networks. One direction of his work looks at the evolution of patterns that develop within random networks, and, in particular, at the critical transition point when a particular property of the network becomes more likely to occur. In 2022, he and his colleague solved the Kahn–Kalai conjecture, which proposed a general mathematical principle to predict thresholds of general properties of random networks. In his work, he has explored general principles and fundamental forces behind phenomena in random systems and random processes, with applications in probability, additive number theory, computer science, and machine learning. Pham earned his bachelor's degree and PhD from Stanford in 2018 and 2023, respectively.
Zhang, who joined Caltech in 2024, works at the intersection of probability theory and statistical physics. He studies a concept called "universality," the idea that radically different systems can exhibit the same large-scale statistical behavior. His research centers on the Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) universal math law, which describes a variety of complex growth processes, such as the expansion of bacterial colonies or the piling up of snow during a storm. These growth processes follow a probability distribution known as the Tracy–Widom law. Zhang mathematically proved the presence of Tracy–Widom laws in the running time of random sorting algorithms and developed techniques to prove Tracy–Widom laws in random matrices. He is currently focused on proving the emergence of Tracy–Widom statistics in a broader class of growth models. He earned his bachelor's degree from MIT in 2017 and PhD from Princeton University in 2022.
According to the Sloan Foundation, 166 faculty from Caltech have received a Sloan Research Fellowship (including this year's winners), since the program's inception in 1955.